For all its jaw-dropping special effects in service of a story about a man who ages in reverse, the most shocking moment in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was the crediting of David Fincher as the film's director.

The man who sharpened "Se7en," "Fight Club" and "Zodiak" to a visceral, mind-bending edge instead achieves a calm, meditative tone in "Button." Brad Pitt stars as the titled character, an anomaly of a man born with a senior's wrinkles and infirmity crippling his 5-pound body. As he matures in the elderly care home to which he was abandoned by his bewildered biological father, Button recovers his hair, his skin smooths out and his vigor swells.

Eric Roth's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story wisely avoids dwelling on the paranormal aspect of its premise and only rarely parlays it into cheap humor. Instead, Fincher sells the illusion with stunning CG and makeup visuals. The 10-year-old Button is a balding, wheelchair-bound man whose inner youth seeps only from Pitt's unmistakable eyes. In his 60s, Button exudes a post-adolescent richness in his face that resembles Pitt in his earliest film roles. Successfully depicting its central character's condition in a matter-of-fact fashion frees "Button" to explore a few compelling themes.

"Button" often runs parallel to "Forrest Gump" in its wide-eyed romanticizing of life's endless possibilities - and the eccentric kindred spirits one meets along the way - through its soft-spoken (and Southern) journeyman protagonist. Some messages resound more loudly than others; a chaos theory-frisking sequence that leads to a mishap for a main character feels prosaic and tedious.

Fincher's inexperience with such delicate, bloodless subject matter shows through in "Button's" lopsided pacing, which front-loads the early, wrinkly years of Button's life and quickly runs through his adulthood. Though this structure may simply reflect the conventional wisdom that time passes faster as one ages.

An amorphous storm metaphor looms over the narration of Daisy, the dying love of Button's life, who recounts their time together to her daughter while Hurricane Katrina approaches the hospital. It's the only trace of Fincher's heavy-handedness in "Button," which otherwise ages quite gracefully.